Comment by TekMol 17 hours ago
What is the business model behind open source projects like bun? How can a company "aquire" it and why does it do that?
In the article they write about the early days
We raised a $7 million seed round
The standard argument here is that the maintainers of the core technology are likely to do a better job of hosting it because they have deeper understanding of how it all works.
There's also the trick Deno has been trying, where they can use their control of the core open source project to build features that uniquely benefit their cloud hosting: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/deno-kv#user-content-the-...
Hosting is a commodity. Runtimes are too. In this case, the strategy is to make a better runtime, attract developers, and eventually give them a super easy way to run their project in the cloud. Eg: bun deploy, which is a reserved no op command. I really like Buns DX.
Yep. This strategy can work, and it has also backfired before, like with Docker trying to monetize something they gave away for free.
Free now isn't free forever. If something has inherent value then folks will be willing to pay for it.
The post mentions why - Bun eventually wanted to provide some sort of cloud-hosting saas product.